This world is full of pleasures. Most of them are so easily available to us. We can eat different types of foods with different tastes. We can take water when we feel thirsty. We get so many comforts for our bodies starting from the bed to the massage parlors. We have ready-made pleasures to please different senses such as different types of fragrances to please our noses. We have different types of music to please our ears. Each of the songs makes us recall our old memories and we start enjoying the old good memories.
The world of internet has radically changed the world we live in. It has made all the pleasures so easily available to us. We can order the food of our taste with just a few touches on the screen of our mobile. We can listen to the songs we like with just one touch. We can see whatever we want, a movie or You Tube video with just one touch on the mobile screen. We neither need to make efforts nor need to wait to satisfy our senses. The market is also collaborating with the world of the internet and making more and more things and services available at the click of a mouse.
Probably, we fail to realize what this ease of pleasures is doing to us silently. It is making us more and more dissatisfied and restless. The human brain is getting used to such a large dose of instant sensual gratification that it is almost impossible for it to take a break from continuous doses of pleasure. Since they have gotten used to such a high dose of neurotransmitters, they are behaving as if they are addicted to drugs showing withdrawal symptoms often. As soon as the internet is gone, we start behaving as if somebody has taken away our lives. We look for the internet madly after going to a hill station or a remote place for a vacation. We carry our music systems and earplugs everywhere. I have seen a strange phenomenon that now pizza and fast food are available even in the mountains and places of pilgrimage.
At the same time, I see a different trend emerging altogether. There are many who are inclined on the spiritual path. More and more are joining the path of yoga. Some stay restricted to a few fasts and follow certain rules in life such as diet regulations. While some practice Asasana and Pranayama. There are many moving along the path of meditation. I see a growing restlessness in the world of pleasures and as a result, many of us are realizing the futility of the world of pleasures.
Probably, the choices in the world have become quite wide. Each being is chosen as per his level of consciousness. Some are busy making the easiest choices. Getting a job to have the food of choice, listen to songs, have fun, and roam around here and there believing that everything will continue like that and cry and crib when something goes wrong. Some make more difficult choices and control their food to stay fit, save money for the future, and work hard at the workplace to get promotions and pay hikes so that they can explore more expensive choices. Some make further difficult choices and work towards gathering power to control the people around them. Some feel the temporariness of these pleasures and move towards spiritual seeking as if spiritual experiences substitute worldly pleasures and get engaged in Guru shopping moving from one baba to the other to make them experience something out of the world just like the drug addicts trying different drugs to get some out of the world experiences.
We all have been blessed with the divine intelligence that allows us to discriminate between the temporary and the permanent. However, so long as the temptation of these pleasures continues, that intelligence remains unused and dormant. It's as if there are many street food shops on the way to the authentic food restaurant and somehow we get tempted to look at the color and smell of the street food and fill our stomachs before reaching the authentic food. This world is full of plenty of temptations that are so easily available. We really need to work on our intelligence if we want to taste authentic food. Else we will keep eating street food each day to soon get trapped in the cycle of diseases.
I was reading the following lines in Savitri by Sri Aurobindo:
"A greater Personality sometimes
Possesses us which yet we know is ours:
Or we adore the Master of our souls.
Then the small bodily ego thins and falls;
No more insisting on its separate self,
Losing the punctilio of its separate birth,
It leaves us one with Nature and with God.
In moments when the inner lamps are lit
And the life's cherished guests are left outside,
Our spirit sits alone and speaks to its gulfs."
I felt that with the flooding of the cheap pleasures made available without effort, such moments are becoming more and more difficult to come. Earlier they used to come quite easily to us when a power cut in the night would force us to go to the roof and look at the stars where we would find new friends in the form of the stars and we start talking to them. Now it's difficult to imagine a person not looking at his mobile for a few hours. However, that "Master of our souls" is too tempting that sooner or later all these worldly temptations will lose their gleam and shine and we have to get back again to the inner world. It's just a matter of time.
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